Fender Bender: Virtual race car to trackside, Virgin style

Fender Bender

English entrepreneur Richard Branson has taken the next step in his Virgin branding with the launch of Virgin Racing in Formula One racing by entering a car designed, built and race tested on computer.

The new Virgin Racing team is one of four new entrants to the 2010 FIA Formula One world championship and has entered its debut race car, the Cosworth-powered VR-01, which has been designed entirely in the digital domain using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics).

The black and red liveried car will be raced by Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi.

The VR-01 is the brainchild of Virgin Racing?s technical director, Nick Wirth, who has gained an international reputation for pioneering a purely CFD approach to car development, wholly designing, building and testing race cars in computer simulation without the need for expensive, resource-heavy scale-model wind tunnel testing.

?Putting together an F1 team, assembling an engineering group and designing a new car from scratch is an e

It will be interesting to watch the Virgin Racing team in action and see how well its computer-designed and tested car performs when the rubber hits the pavement in testing and then racing.